French Lieutenant's Woman. A Screenplay

SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF PINTER'S PUBLISHED SCREENPLAY FOR THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, ONE OF ONLY 360 COPIES SIGNED BY HAROLD PINTER AND JOHN FOWLES

(FOWLES, John) PINTER, Harold. The French Lieutenant's Woman. A Screenplay. With a Foreword by John Fowles. Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown, (1981). Octavo, original navy cloth, original slipcase. $500.

Signed limited first edition, number 45 of only 350 numbered copies (360 total) signed by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and novelist John Fowles.

John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) long tempted filmmakers such as Lindsay Anderson and Fred Zinneman but, for many, the novel’s intricate narrative design “couldn’t be less cinematic.” It was not until Harold Pinter was persuaded to write the screenplay that the film moved ahead under the direction of Karel Reisz with stars Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. As Fowles writes in his Foreword, it was Pinter’s “genius” that created the “final miracle. Quite simply, it at last made possible” the 1981 film that would earn praise by critic Vincent Canby as an “immaculately visualized adaptation of Fowles’ best-selling book… the film's beauty is dazzling. It stands with—or perhaps a little ahead of—Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Polanski's Tess." Pinter, "the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation," won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature prior to his death in 2008 (New York Times). "First Edition" stated on copyright page. One of 350 numbered copies of 360 total, with ten lettered copies reserved for the publisher. Slipcase with printed label affixed to front; as issued without dust jacket. Issued the same year as a limited edition of 25 copies signed by Fowles and seven of the film’s principles, and the first trade edition: no priority determined.

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AquatintCopperplate process by which the plate is “bitten” by exposure to acid. By changing the areas of the plate that are exposed and the length of time the plate is submerged in the acid bath, the engraver can obtain fine and varying shades of gray that closely resemble watercolor washes. Although the name contains the word “tint”, this is a black-and-white printing process; aquatint plates can often be hand colored, however.

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